Like most folks, I had never heard of Sarah Palin until Friday morning when Sen. John McCain announced that she would be his running mate.

After seeing the headline on CNN.com, I wanted more information on the obscure governor of Alaska. So I wandered on over to Wikipedia, where I stumbled across a fierce, digital battle over her entry.

As I write this late Friday afternoon, there had already been more than 1,200 edits to her entry. What I saw unfold over the course of the day was a chaotic, complex, messy process, but one that ultimately led to an article that was far longer and deeper.

Wikipedia tends to push people's buttons. Founded in 2001, the online encyclopedia allows anyone to edit articles, relying on the wisdom of the crowd to contribute and to improve the amount and quality of information. I've found that people either see this as a symbol of what's best about the Web, or a sign that society no longer cares about accuracy and expertise.

I saw the frenzy around Palin's entry as an interesting test case. While she had a decent-size entry before Friday, she was hardly a major public figure. So there was plenty left unsaid there, plenty of gaps to be filled in.

The stakes over this fight are not huge, but still notable. Her entry won't sway the outcome of the election. But it will be the place over the coming weeks where a sizable number of people will come to learn who she is.

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Wikipedia allows anyone to view the history of changes. Some contributions are anonymous, though many contributors create profiles that track all of their edits and revisions. There is also a running discussion about the merits of changes.

As I clicked through the various revisions of Palin's entry, I found a wide mix of folks who seemed to be there for a lot of different reasons. Clearly, there were a lot with an agenda, some pro-McCain and some pro-Barack Obama.

Given the flood of information emerging about her, it's a mammoth task trying to figure out what belongs and what doesn't. There were robust debates, for instance, about whether to link to an article that quotes Palin saying she smoked pot. There was another discussion about how some of Palin's oil policies had led some Alaskans to compare her to Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez.

There were many more contributors who, based on the discussions around their edits, were simply striving to make the article accurate and non-ideological.

As the day wore on, Jredmond, a Wiki administrator, changed the "protection level" on the article, noting that it had become high-profile and that "vandalism from new and unregistered users is far outweighing their positive contribs at the moment." That meant that anonymous users could no longer make edits.

There was, of course, a big debate about the wisdom of that decision. But the results by the end of the afternoon were impressive. Virtually everything was referenced, as evidenced by the 85 (and counting) footnotes at the bottom and the dozens of links contained within the article.

Wikipedia's community had banded together to assert its ideals, to try to keep the article free from bias and controversy. Did they succeed? That's harder to say, especially since the article will forever remain a work in progress.

But Wikipedia demonstrated that at its core are a community of passionate, committed volunteers who are determined to get it right. And that speaks well for its future.